


what comes after

by porcia_catonis



Category: Ready or Not (2019)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Gen, Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 13:40:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20507912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/porcia_catonis/pseuds/porcia_catonis
Summary: Memory--He can’t speak when Alex pleads with him not to go; he can hear it. He listens. It’s like waking up in bed, body stiff as a board, mind heavy as stone. He’s known this feeling before. Wait. Wait. Wait. One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand. And just as he loosens himself, head to toe, he’s up, easy as breathing. He rises.Alternatively, Daniel Le Domas is dead, but not gone. He sees the way it ends.





	what comes after

**Memory**\--He can’t speak when Alex pleads with him not to go; he can hear it. He listens. It’s like waking up in bed, body stiff as a board, mind heavy as stone. He’s known this feeling before. Wait. Wait. Wait. One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand. And just as he loosens himself, head to toe, he’s up, easy as breathing. He rises.

He doesn’t think about what came before, doesn’t ask those questions of how; Alex’s hands are tinged with red, and his eyes are still wet and Daniel’s got an outstretched arm. He hasn’t left him, doesn’t think he could.

He’s racing down the hall, following him. _‘ Alex, I’m still here. Alex, listen to me--! ’_ but he can’t, or he won’t. Grace’s voice, his mother’s, his brothers all go on without him. He thinks he shouts something again, and when it reaches no one, or they won’t seem to receive it, he runs a hand through his hair, down his neck, finds it smooth.

Oh. _Oh_, fuck.

He looks back to the room where it happened, wondering where the pain in his neck and the feeling of suffocation went. He finds it on the ground, his own face blank, his body going stiff. Charity is long gone, gun forgotten on the floor. 

He looks to his left, sees a fire burning in his father’s study. Serves him right, the bastard. A little ember of pride finds a light in his chest. _Burn it down, Grace, then get the hell out._

“She’s in here!” His brother’s voice is screaming, and Daniel freezes in the foyer, standing over a body bleeding his blood, staining his shirt, and for a moment, all he can do is stare.  


‘ what the_ fuck_, Alex? ’ it’s got to be a decoy, or some plan hatched in desperate heat, made hotter by the fanning flames. He’s still standing there when a body rushes past him, hooded, and then another, through him. ‘ _Oh, fuck you, I’m-- _’ what, standing here? They can’t see him, can they, without the exterior?

He follows the swarm of bodies, some hooded, some clear as day. 

They’re at the table, and he can see who’s there, who isn’t. Charity looks past him, and he can’t make himself face the look in her eyes; his are locked on Alex, holding the knife.

_‘ Come on, Alex, ’_ he’s waiting to be right, waiting for Alex to be the good one, the one not to damn someone to an afterlife of rot in a goat pen. He’s waiting for his brother to take the knife, to cut the ropes, slam in into Mr. Le Bail’s box, or toss it into the waiting for.  


“Hail Satan.” 

“Hail Satan.”  


“Hail Satan.”  


When the knife comes down, his heart sinks with it, and he’s looking away until screaming, flailing, the sound of ripping fabric pull his gaze back up. Grace is bloody, standing, brandishing the knife that had pierced her, and is vengefully, painfully, alive.

‘ Fuck yes! ‘ his heart would be picking up, had it a pulse. Get away, he finds himself hoping. He’d thought Alex, at the least, may deserve to be alive to see another day, to know love, or heartbreak or whatever ordinary miseries life dealt to the good.

Now, he thinks he’s content to let it all burn. _We all deserve to die. _He was never supposed to be the good one. How the fuck did it end up like this?

When the bodies burst, he finds himself flinching, grateful the gore cannot touch him, that he has no being for the viscera to paint.

He meets Charity’s eyes as she begs to go home, wonders if she still means what she said to him, that she was better off dead. In spite of himself, he can’t watch her go, closing his eyes just a moment before the end.

He’s there when the police come, he’s there when the flames are out, and he’s there when he’s the only one of them all to go six feet under.

Daniel Le Domas, like the rest of them, is dead. But somehow, by some sick sense of divine humor, he’s not gone.


End file.
